The one moment when she had been at all afraid of weakening was when he first got into her bed and she felt at once that he had no pajamas on. Stiff in his pleading embrace she still resisted, though her heart went out in pity for his nakedness. He seemed at that moment more pathetic than ever. It hadn’t been his fault; not more than half a dozen times in ten years had he done such a thing. It had long been part of his tact and consideration that he never took it for granted beforehand that she would let him make love to her, so that whenever he came to her bed it was always with his pajamas on, both jacket and pants; if he took them off at all, it was only after their love-­making had begun. Last night he had had no pajamas to put on or take off because he hadn’t unpacked. When she heard him undress in the dark, in fact, and get into his bed—when she lay there in the dark herself and thought of him lying naked between the cold sheets of the unfamiliar bed—she wished she had thought to lay out his pajamas for him before he came back upstairs.

From the little square where she sat, irregular lanes wound away toward the back alleys of Sconset, toward the moors, or the beach. Along these lanes could be seen incredibly small cottages of the salt-­box variety, high and tiny, packed so intimately close together that one could scarcely have walked between them, unpainted or else weather-­beaten to a harmonious uniform hue that was not color at all, and every one of them all but smothered in rambler roses which were fast fading from their bright original pink (for the season was getting on and the sun was strong now) to a pink-­white. Many of them had quaint but quite useless picket fences hemming in their infinitesimal yards, useless because knee-­high; into the parlor of most of them one could have stepped directly from the street in a single step. It was all picturesque, charming, and self-­conscious, exactly as one expected to find it, so that pictorially Sconset held no surprise whatever to anyone who had ever seen picture postcards of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, or the Cape.